War On Truancy Working

Skipping School Looks Less Popular This Year

TAVARES - Attendance is up in Lake County middle and high schools, and officials say it's partly because they're telling parents bluntly that kids belong in class.

Hundreds of letters have gone home to parents of students who have four or more unexcused absences, ordering them to get their kids into school or face a judge. Another batch of more than 900 letters will go out today.

``We are making a much more concerted effort to contact the parents of these students,'' said Michael Elchenko, principal of Oak Park Middle School in Leesburg.

The letters are getting results, he said. An attendance report for the first quarter of the school year, released Thursday, shows that absenteeism has fallen substantially from last year, when officials declared truancy rampant in county schools.

One in four high school students was a chronic skipper last year.

``There have been significant improvements over where we were last year,'' said Jay Marshall, supervisor of student services for Lake County schools.

Overall, the percentage of truant high school students dropped from 26 percent last year to 17.7 percent this year.

Marshall said increased community awareness of the local truancy epidemic as well as various attendance incentives at the schools also were helping draw students more regularly to class.

Deputy Superintendent Fred Colvard also credited a series of Lake Sentinel articles on school skipping with helping reduce the absentee rate. ``The more awareness we have, the more people say their kids need to be in school,'' Colvard said.

To get an early grasp on absentee rates this year, Marshall tallied the number of students who missed five or more days during the first nine weeks of school.

He compared that percentage at each school with the percentage of students who missed 21 or more days last school year. The 21 days are a red flag set by the state for too much time out of school.

Those who already have missed five or more days are well on the way to truancy for the year, Marshall reasoned. Some chronic school skippers already have missed as many as 25 of 45 days, he said.

In middle schools countywide, the rate went from 20.9 percent of truant students last year to 15.1 percent this year.

Elementary school attendance, always better than that in middle and high school, remained about the same: 11.5 percent of students are out of school too much.

At Leesburg High, Principal Wayne McLeod was ecstatic with the results of the report. His school went from having the second highest absenteeism rate among regular high schools in all of Central Florida to the second lowest in Lake County.

``That's a lot better than I expected. I had hoped we could get into the low 20 percent range,'' McLeod said.

Only Mount Dora High, with 15 percent of students absent five or more days, had higher attendance.

Among middle and high schools, only Umatilla High slipped in attendance, falling from 22.7 percent of students missing too much school last year to 25.9 percent this year.

Principal Dale Moxley had not seen the report Thursday and had no immediate explanation for the decline in attendance.

School Board member Jimmy Conner said that putting responsibility for school attendance on parents is exactly where it belongs. The School Board last summer targeted improved attendance as a priority. ``Obviously, kids can't learn if they are not in school,'' Conner said.

Lake County and Orange County school district officials last summer used computer analysis to turn up correlations between poor academic performance and high absenteeism.

They said the studies proved what any classroom teacher already knows: Missed school equals poor grades.

At Leesburg High, McLeod hopes the increased attendance will show up in higher scores as juniors today take the second half of the High School Competency Test, a state test they must pass to graduate. The first part was administered Thursday.

``It should boost our scores a few percentage points, just by the kids being in school,'' McLeod said.

Marshall said that 924 parents of Lake County public school students were notified in September that their children already had four unexcused absences.

A new state law requires school districts around Florida to contact parents when their children have between three and six absences.

Marshall prepared another 966 letters Thursday to be sent to more parents whose kids missed four days with no excuses.

Officials expect most parents to cooperate and pay more attention to getting their kids into school. But those who don't could be taken to court, officials said.